Billionaire Mark Cuban has decided to put all of his weight behind a campaign to smear US troops in Iraq as “monsters’. Cuban has decided that De Palma’s film “Redacted” must be seen as the cornerstone of his and De Palma’s self-declared anti-victory campaign against America and her troops fighing in Iraq.

I shy from getting into any polital comments after my last disasterous outburst...but I will say this...I have a stepson over there. He's 22,and I would like to see him come home alive. As wrong as I believe any war is...and whatever the reasons are for being there,our guys don't need to be demoralized by a some stupid Hollywood shmuck.

I just checked the link from Drudges archives it's dead from there too, so hmmm. So I searched that sites archives with the keyword "Cuban" and found this ...

Quote

Mark Cuban

Billionaire Mark Cuban has decided to put all of his weight behind a campaign to smear US troops in Iraq as “monsters’. Cuban has decided that De Palma’s film “Redacted” must be seen as the cornerstone of his and De Palma’s self-declared anti-victory campaign against America and her troops fighing in Iraq. Cuban’s company Magnolia Pictures will be bringing this propganda campaign to a theater near you this winter. According to a source close to Cuban, the decision for Magnolia to develop, finance and distribute the film was personally made by Çuban. Cuban has a full producer credit on the film, and DePalma shot it on HiDef video at Cuban’s request, in order for it to qualify as fodder for Cuban’s hi-def cable channel. So far neither he or DePalma have explained how they can be “bringing the truth of the Iraq war to the American people”, as Louie DePalma has said, when neither of them have ever been to Iraq, filmed any of “Redacted” in Iraq, or spent one minute with any soldier in Iraq. Clearly they are only bringing you their imagined propagandists’ reality of Iraq. Both had the opportunity to go, both declined. They have chosen the coward’s path in a quest for legitimacy as spokesmen for the Iraq war, and as such both have failed in that quest. Indeed, they are left standing as laughingstocks. Their reach has exceeded their grasp. Cuban is a jet-set, armchair “Iraq Truther” who made sure not to have his private jet stop anywhere near Iraq. But he and DePalma are more than anxious to bring you the “reality of the Iraq war”.

Quote

I shy from getting into any polital comments after my last disasterous outburst

I have to say I'm not convinced that the actions in Iraq are justified. To me, it seems the U.S. is occupying another country not for its benefit but for their own. Still, I have nothing against troops doing their job. I'm just not convinced it's the right one in this case.

The troops dont want to be there any more than they're wanted there. Wither by their friends and family or by the citizens of said occupied country.In fact, I think the only one who wants out troops there is Bush. And he's lost his support long ago

Dang I hate to hear that . . . I am a huge Dallas Mavericks fan and Cuban is an awesome team owner. But I did and do support the war effort in Iraq; it has not always been handled well, but I believe from the start that it met the Augustinian definition of a "just war". Our brave soldiers doing difficult work under nearly impossible conditions deserve better than this CRAP.

Let me tell you that this is going to bite cuban in the rear. Yes he is rich but I'll tell you that the support of our troops is in the high 90%. I don't care if you support the war or not. A lot of sons and daughters are in Iraq. Mess with them and you mess with us. Last word..STAND BY..

I heard about this the other day listening to The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly. For the uninitiated, the film is about a true incident where four solders raped a 14 year old Iraqi girl, shot her, set her body on fire and supposedly killed her family to cover up the crime. Now, what happened was a horrible, horrible thing, and should be deplored, but I have to agree with Bill when says that all this film is going to do is serve as a propaganda pieces for anti-US forces, stir up more hatred and violence, and put the lives of over 200,000 service people in Iraq and Afghanistan in even more danger.

I recall months back about how there was a report from Newsweek about a Koran being flushed down the toilet at Gitmo. The story lead to riots in several parts of the world and people getting killed. Turns out the story was false, but the news media, in their rush to print ANYTHING negative about the U.S., went ahead and posted it without bothering to fully check it's facts.

I think with this film, its going to be more of the same.

I'm not saying someone should stop him from making it, but I do think it's a despicable choice.

I've been against the war from the outset. I think the whole thing is bulls**t and we've lost far too many lives and sunk way too much money into a cause that was never clear from the beginning. We've been lied to, we've been screwed and it's going to take decades to dig ourselves out of this hole. American foreign policy is going to carry a huge, black stain on it for a long, long time before anyone trusts us again. And the worst part of it all is that the troops are the ones getting the short end of the stick the whole time. They put their ass on the line and when they come back, they get some hollow gratitude from the public, even more jeering from the other half of the public and no support from the government.

But if there is one thing I cannot f**king stand above all else in the political arena, it's snooty Hollywood a***oles who use the medium of film to propagate their god damn hyper-liberal message. I consider myself quite liberal but the people even further out to the left than me, with more money than they know what to do with feel compelled to make movies and documentaries and air their particular points of view during awards acceptance speeches and on the red carpet; all of them disgust me.

If there's one thing that makes me craziest, it's the attitude. This arrogant, misinformed sense of righteousness.

At the bottom line, Redacted is about a very, very unfortunate incident. It's one among a handful of very unfortunate, monstrous acts carried out by US troops, but it and the others are hardly a reflection of the hundreds of thousands of people serving.

I'm against any kind of misrepresentation, whether of American troops or the movie itself. I won't judge the movie without having seen it (that said, I don't have any plans to watch it).

In an email to Bill O'Reilly published on his blog Marc Cuban denies the movie is anti-American propaganda: "Seperate the self promotion of Brian Depalma from the movie. The movie is fully pro Troops. The hero of the movie is a soldier who stands up for what is right in the face of adversity." (Full text: http://www.blogmaverick.com/2007/09/04/me-and-bill-oreilly/).

I bet the threat of a defamation action from Cuban's lawyers is why the articles CheezeFlixz posted got pulled.

As a side note there's lots of infighting between the producers and De Palma. Check out this argument between De Palma and another one of his producers at a press conference:

"The basic plot is that Donna Speir and Hope Marie Carlton, the two undercover DEA agent Playboy Playmates from the last movie, are still running around in jungle shorts, cowboy boots and spaghetti strap T-shirts, firing their machine guns at drug smugglers, Filipino communist guerrillas, and corrupt federal agents while their two friends, Lisa London and Miss May 1984 Patty Duffek, lounge around the pool a lot and talk on speaker phones that look like fax machines."-Joe Bob on SAVAGE BEACH

I don't understand why out of all the stories, both good and bad coming out of Iraq that Hollywood has to make mostly negative movies. There are far more positive stories to tell, but that doesn't serve there agenda.

I'm all for free of speech but with that freedom come the responsibility to exercise restraint in the best interest of the troops safety. Films like this will do nothing more than fan the flame of anti-American movements in the middle east and further endanger the life of those troops with this rebel-rousing. Jeez with some of the crap movies they put out these days, they could make a movie about the troops building schools for Iraqi children ... but that would be ... what ... American?

This country doesn't put forth a unified front that is did in the many wars prior to Vietnam (I think we know what happened there.) and nothing good has come of it. Not everyone one in WWII or Korea thought we should be involved and we're going were we didn't need to be, but history proved those choices correct. The public, industry, the press and Hollywood put forth a unified front and we won and in the process created one of the biggest industrial booms in our history.

It's that old saying and my states motto, United WE Stand, Divided WE Fall.

This country doesn't put forth a unified front that is did in the many wars prior to Vietnam (I think we know what happened there.)

Even then, while the news media was putting out the negative on Vietnam, Hollywood produced exactly ONE 'Nam movie during the conflict: The Green Berets (definitely NOT an anti-war movie).

True, it was mostly in the music then. However the little know "Head" in 1968 had anti-war undertones, but the 1974 film "Hearts and Minds" was I'd think the first modern anti-war documentary film. There were a few prior to the 1970's but they were few and far between. Now it seems like there are more movies against the US coming out than the mindless dribble they normally make.